WASHINGTON — U.S. surveillance of bulk communications now under review by the Obama administration was first authorized by President George W. Bush after Sept. 11, 2001, and has been defended as “critically important” to national security, declassified records show.

Bush renewed the program for collection of telephone-call records every 30 to 60 days beginning Oct. 4, 2001, shortly after the terrorist attacks. That program and another involving Internet communications were brought under jurisdiction of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court by 2007, National Intelligence Director James Clapper said in a statement Saturday.

Clapper said the agency was declassifying records on the existence of the surveillance programs under Bush in compliance with the court’s order following their disclosure by former government contractor Edward Snowden.

National security officials in both the Bush and Barack Obama administrations said the collection of bulk telephone records of Americans helped uncover terrorist plots, according to the records. That assertion appears to counter findings of an advisory panel that recommended Obama change the program Dec. 18 because the data “was not essential to preventing attacks” and “could readily have been obtained in a timely manner using conventional” court orders, the panel wrote.

A former intelligence director under Bush, Mike McConnell, called the data collection “among the most important intelligence tools available to the United States for protecting the homeland from another catastrophic terrorist attack,” according to one of the records, McConnell’s testimony in a lawsuit challenging the program.

The five-member Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology recommended that spying on telephone and online communications be allowed to continue, though with limits on how much data can be collected and stored.

Obama told reporters Friday that he would act next month on the panel’s recommendations.

“What we’re doing now is evaluating all of the recommendations that have been made,” Obama said at the news conference, before leaving for a vacation in Hawaii. “I’m going to make a pretty definitive statement about all of this in January.”

Snowden, who is now in Russia under temporary asylum, leaked records about the spy programs to news organizations starting in June. Since then, there have been calls by U.S. allies overseas, members of Congress, civil liberties groups and companies such as Google and Facebook to provide more transparency and scale back some of the operations.

The al-Qaida terrorist group that attacked the U.S. on Sept. 11 and brought down the World Trade Center’s twin towers in New York City has “consistently focused plotting against U.S. interests on either conducting spectacular attacks against the homeland or striking other symbolic or economic targets,” Dennis Blair, Obama’s first director of national intelligence, said in his testimony in another court case.

U.S. troops killed the leader of al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden, in 2011.

Blair said the data collection was “critically important” to uncovering any future plots.

The owners of Boulder’s Sterling University Peaks apartments, who this summer were cited for illegally subdividing 92 bedrooms in the complex, have reached an agreement to settle the case for $410,000, the city announced Thursday.